By Richard Odell There comes a certain hour in September. The long march of Spring and Summer stands still. The alder leaves are now a time-hardened raiment of darkened green with flecks of brindle and gold. The broken fields are spent, whitened, at rest in the tilted sunlight. One looks upon it all and feels…
Island Voices, September 2026
Magnificent Ruins
Part Three: Wingehaven, Shakespeare’s Shack, MacDonald’s Farm By Richard Odell Mike Sudduth, classmate, fellow Beall Greenhouse potting-shed drudge, and Vashon historical researcher, lent a hand with this article. Down deep into the canyon below the Falcon’s Nest, down to where you could hear waves break on the beach, you came upon another monumental relic; a…
August 2026, Island Voices
Magnificent Ruins
Part Two: The Falcon’s Nest By Richard Odell from Part One: “My parents would one day move to that island, and within a few years find themselves, by choice of housing, connected by an overgrown lane to the source of that pillar of smoke, a mansion that now lay in ruins. I was but five…
Island Voices, July 2026
Magnificent Ruins
Part One: Alexander’s Field By Richard Odell “People seem, but things are.” Rainer Rilke It all went back to the war. My parents’ eastern Washington origins were always somewhat murky, to me. More often, when they spoke of past times, they referred to their days at High Point, a war-time housing development in southwest Seattle,…
Island Voices, June 2026, Literary
Parallel Lives – Lois
By Richard Odell Some among us get trees like a disease. Big boys are especially prone, but big girls get it too, sometimes. The psychosis might simmer for years, before it really starts to roil. I’d always been a plant guy, and I liked trees well enough. Wanted to see more of them, hated to…
April 2026, Island Resilience
Parallel Lives – Bill Robinson Saves the Farmer’s Market
By Richard Odell Identifying points of origin is like picking up ice cream with one’s fingers. One never gets all of it. It might be said, however, the Farmers’ Market we have today began with some now forgotten young man selling oranges by the drop-off box at the post office. This marketing genius was soon…
March 2026, Nature
Parallel Lives – The Rare “True” Firs of Vashon-Maury
By Richard Odell We know them mostly by their strange profile, if we know them at all, rising singly, here and there, above the dense skylines of Douglas Firs, their rounded, shaggy heads in contrast to the pointed spires of their surrounding neighbors. They are the rare and “true” firs, Abies grandis, of Vashon-Maury. A…
February 2026, Island Voices
Parallel Lives / Wayside Concerns
Tige and Daisy Leamer outside Leamer’s Shopping CenterCourtesy of Candace BrownPhotographer: Howard Willsie By Richard Odell Did I imagine Daisy’s? My father liked to circulate. He had me in tow, at age three or four, deep in the 1950s. I remember an interior scene where today is Minglement. The presence of several adults, their voices…
Island Voices, January 2026
Nothing Says “New” Like 1960
By Richard Odell I’ve always associated the 1940s with the color blue. Why, I don’t know. The 1930s I’ve seen always as dull green. Picture books, maybe, dated objects, impressed indelibly the child’s perception. That I associate the 1950s with black and white seems obvious enough, for the greater world first came to this child’s…